Super Bowl halftime performances can be and often are quite bad. In the early years of the show, you were lucky to get a marching band, a college drill team, a few incongruous movie stars, or some other wholesome business. Carol Channing played twice. The youth educational organization Up with People made four appearances between […]
You can’t control your reputation. You think you can by striving to do and be good, but people are hard to win over now, and with good reason. Hucksters are on a powerful tear. No one buys anyone else’s story anymore. Come up too quickly, and you get called a grifter or an “industry plant.” […]
Frances Quinlan is still getting used to performing with backing tracks. She didn’t want to take more than a guitar on tour, to make it easier to explore cities, but that means she has to keep up with the Macbook on stage next to her instead. “It’s like playing with the most merciless band in […]
This was always going to be a heavy Grammy ceremony, but there was no way to tell just how heavy it would get. Upheaval at the highest levels of the Recording Academy had muddied the days leading up to the show. On January 16, it was announced that Academy president and CEO Deborah Dugan — […]
Last week, Justin Bieber was roundly mocked for sharing a graphic on his Instagram page that instructed fans on how to game streaming numbers in an effort to get his new (uh) ode to marital relations, “Yummy,” to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It included tips like “Create a playlist with ‘Yummy’ on […]